Wake up to a long-dormant Dutch titan

The Dutch mathematician, physicist and astronomer Christiaan Huygens
(1629-1695) has been neglected by historians like no other truly great
scientist. A measure of this neglect is the fact that this biography by
Cees Andriesse is the first to be published in English, a translation of the
Dutch original Titan kan niet slapen (Titan cannot sleep) that
appeared more than ten years ago. In the Netherlands, Christiaan's
fame is outshone by that of his father, Constantijn Huygens, whom the
Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as the ``most versatile
and the last of the true Dutch renaissance virtuosos''. Abroad,
Huygens suffers from his name being unpronouncable for anyone not raised
on guttural sounds, and from the failure of foreign scholars to bother
with Dutch manuscripts.

Huygens made headlines last year when the space probe bearing his name
landed on Titan on January 14, 2005. This moon, the largest of Saturns's
satellites, was discovered by Huygens in 1655 using a telescope of his own
design. ``Titan'' is also the title of honour by which Andriesse refers to
Huygens throughout the book.

``Titan cannot sleep'' alludes to the melancholia and insomnia that
plagued Huygens during the latter part of his life. While this illness is
well documented, Andriesse's Freudian analysis left this reviewer,
at least, unconvinced. There is much speculation about unrequited love
and the women in the life of Huygens, who never married, but scant
evidence apart from some cryptic poems. On the whole, however, it
pays off that the author allows his imagination a little licence.
Considering that he is a professional engineer, his style is
surprisingly engaging and poetic.

The editors at Cambridge University Press must have regarded the
original title as too poetic for their taste and opted for the more
sober ``The Man Behind the Principle''. The principle that bears
Huygens's name explains the propagation of light in terms of elementary
waves emanating from each point of a wave front. Motivated by
a mechanistic view of all physical phenomena, it is in essence a
purely geometric principle.

It may be argued that it was his adherence to a mechanistic world-view that
prevented Huygens from discovering the law of gravitation before Newton.
Many of Newton's ideas are foreshadowed in Huygens's treatise on
centrifugal force, written before Newton's Principia but
published only posthumously. Einstein acknowledges his debt to Huygens
in realising the consequences of the relativity of motion.

The French mathematician Marin Mersenne was so impressed by Huygens's
early mathematical accomplishments that he wrote to Huygens senior
about the then 17-year-old boy: ``If he carries on like this, he will
surpass Archimedes himself.'' Huygens soon earned his reputation
across Europe. In 1666 he was appointed the first scientific director
of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. When Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz reported the news of Huygens's death to the Swiss mathematician
Johann Bernoulli, he wrote of the ``incomparable Huygens''.

Today Huygens is mostly remembered for his achievements in the
applied sciences. Outstanding among these is his work on the pendulum
clock. Accurate clocks are essential for determining longitude at sea,
and thus of vital importance for a seafaring nation like the Dutch.
Several of the theoretical and practical problems in building a reliable
sea chronometer were solved by Huygens.

In spite of the author's scientific background, this biography is aimed
primarily at the general reader. The extensive bibliography that has
been added to the English translation makes this book an excellent starting
point for a deeper exploration of the life and work of Huygens. There is
a name index, but the professional reader will miss a subject index.

There is not enough mathematics in Andriesse's text to dispel the notion
that Huygens was a mathematician of talent rather than genius, who failed
to grasp the power of the new analytic methods invented by Leibniz and
Newton. Andriesse's mathematical terminology is not always accurate
and has been mangled further in the translation. Also he might have made
a stronger case for the surprising modernity of Huygens's mathematical
ideas.

Andriesse's beautiful allusive style may occasionally lost on readers
of this translation. For instance, an account of a supposed stroll by
Huygens and his teacher Frans van Schooten along the Rapenburg in Leiden
will fail to evoke the desired images if one does not know that this
street is not only the location of the old university but arguably
the most beautiful canal in the Netherlands.

These are minor quibbles about what is otherwise a magnificent biography,
full of music, poetry, letters to friends and ministers, and much else
from the riches of 17th-century culture and politics.